Some Humorous Epitaphs

Many forget that we should learn to be wise enough to laugh at the world and ourselves. Without laughter–the universal tonic for all melancholic maladies–it becomes ever easier to take ourselves too seriously, and to retreat into comfortable recesses of our own minds that promise nothing but stagnation and sterility. This may be the unconscious message of the humorous epitaph: a warning to the living that our time here is not unlimited, and that unless we appreciate the idea of memento mori, we are living in delusion. Few things are so grim that we cannot make light of them somehow.

In 1900, Arthur Wentworth Eaton published a now-forgotten volume called Funny Epitaphs. It is a slim book, barely amounting to eighty pages. I bought it at a used book fair yesterday for a dollar. Eaton provides no information on how he collected the epitaphs; apparently they were just noted by him in his travels through the North Atlantic and the British Isles. Here are a few of them.

“Underneath this heavy cross
Lies my mother in law poor
Had she lived three days more
I’d be here and she would read
You, that are passing by
Try not to wake her up
For she comes back home
She’ll bite my head off
But I’ll act in the way
That she will not return
Stay here my dear
Mother-in-law.”